Max Soar

ONE BILLION DOLLARS.

IT WAS THE ADDITIONAL ONE BILLION THAT MADE THEM STOP THE DUNEDIN HOSPITAL AND IREX.

No money for hospitals or the ferries, money to prop up fossil fuels.

"Customer data will drive our decisions" is an idea at the root of so many recent institutional failures. It works when you're selling a luxury item, but not when you're doing politics or journalism, or education. Anything that requires a principled position cannot rely on the preferences of others.

Hayek‘s Bastards = 90s-brained thinktankers like D’Souza scouring the depths of bad science to find faux-natural levers to prop up hierarchy under perceived threat.

Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source Software, Researchers Argue ‘If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?’

‘If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?’

this rules

Is stagnating science funding leaving NZ more exposed to hazards? The scientists' association says reform of science funding has stagnated, and leaves the country exposed to worsening hazards.

Co-President Dr Lucy Stewart spoke to Kathryn Ryan on Nine to Noon this morning about the continued failure of the government's science sector reforms to make necessary change (or provide desperately needed funding increases)

Reminder of the scale shift of last few years. When Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion it was discussed for days. Yesterday he merged its parent company, xAI, valued at $250 billion with SpaceX, valued at $1 trillion and it was just a Monday.

Teaching friends: anyone got an aesthetically pleasing system/ template for slideshows that require minimal fuss and present info/images clearly and accessibly?

Yours sincerely, someone with opinions about how slides look but zero visual design talent.

The Jeffrey Epstein files: New Zealand mentioned more than 1000 times New Zealand is mentioned more than a thousand times in the Jeffrey Epstein files released by the US Justice Department.

Stuff takes the incredible journalistic step of *using the search function* to get a "NZ mentioned" headline and then the article doesn't mention either Thiel (a NZ citizen) or Pinker (invited here by the FSU to speak TONIGHT)

www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/3609...

Casual staff | Human Resources - UNSW Sydney

Because UoA has no guidelines on payment rates for guest lectures, I was looking for reasonable information online and found this UNSW page showing casual academic pay rates.

I'm sure this is news to nobody but casual staff are MASSIVELY underpaid in NZ.
www.unsw.edu.au/human-resour...

The nature of information overload is for our brains to seek patterns to make sense of them and in the flood of epstein documents its easy to see a grand conspiracy as a flotation device, but it is a conspiracy to the extent that class society is a conspiracy, which is to say, a system

The epstein files reveal the bourgeoisie acting AS A CLASS, which is to say, sharing ideas, cultural touchstones and social circles. But they do not invent economic conditions out of idle conversations, they are idiots repeating what they hear from their underlings and colleagues, please im begging

How are you supposed to explain to people how this entire social, political, and economic reality is entirely downstream from anime getting banned on some dipshit's forum 25ish years ago

every epstein file drop underscores how elite power operates through shared socio-economic networks, regardless of people's ideological differences, populist posturing, or public feuds

i read through this and then went back through Eco's 14 points of Ur-Fascism probably yearly at this point and each time with new and more pressing understanding theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umbe...

This should be headline news across every outlet in the country. This deal happening in secret - let alone directly involving us in a fascist war machine - should be criminal, fuck.

The way these people really went from capitalism is the best system to provide all of the things to “eat less”.

every time i see a white guy in their fifties radicalized by the twitter algorithm into racism and extremism i think about how it's a total failure of the youtube algorithm to instead radicalize him into home brewing, elaborate A/V setups, or DIY solar

ACC shouldn't need access to your medical information. They should just pay the compensation and bills as directed by your doctors.

Medicine should be strictly the role of the health sector. ACC isn't health sector: they're a finance.

We've let financiers make our medical decisions for too long.

ACC reform I'd like to see: they should handle payments and not medical information.

The should be required to accept the assessment of whatever qualified specialist you choose. They should have no role in (mis)interpreting medical advice, or sending you for treatments.

Been doing this dance for over 6 years with ACC. Despite having clear recommendations for rehabilitation that are likely to work, ACC refuses to make rehab accessible in favour of continual 'assessments' from cronies.

ACC plans on "getting more non-serious injury clients out of the long-term claims pool" to get its financies in order.

That's an admission that they've either not been doing their job in the past, or plan to not do their job in the future. It has to be one or both. Either should land them in court.

Ex-Education Ministry staffer says new school curriculum heavily politicised "I watched colleagues run back and forth to the Beehive for approval, watched academics and sector experts be removed," she says.

Ooof!
Ex-Education Ministry staffer says new school curriculum heavily politicised www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

Nicky Hager: Judith Collins not fit for Law Commission role The journalist behind Dirty Politics has questioned Collins’ appointment.

Nicky Hager says Judith Collins is “clearly and demonstrably not” fit for the Law Commission role

www.thepost.co.nz/politics/360...

Quote from Danyl McLauchlan in the Listener: If the right is divided between orthodoxy and austerity, the left remains intellectually absent. At the end of last year, Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick toured Europe meeting left-wing economic luminaries: Mariana Mazzucato, Thomas Piketty, Yanis Varoufakis, Gary Stevenson. There is a yawning space in the discourse for a coherent left-wing theory of what has gone wrong in New Zealand and how to fix it. Perhaps Swarbrick can persuade her perpetually distracted party to focus on issues that affect voters’ lives, to offer solutions that are more humane than the neoliberals’, less cynical and nihilistic than the centrist parties’. One thing Ruth Richardson has always understood is that political economy isn’t just a source of jargon to hoodwink voters. It’s a framework for political parties to understand what they’re doing, and why – the reason they want to be in government at all.

Mystifying quote from the NZ Listener (yes I hear you, there's the problem right there, etc) but I do think it needs questioning. History will show Greens were nothing but consistent for 20 or 30 years in terms of well researched policies but commentariat narratives are stronger than the evidence.

Evergreen reminder that this was something she came up with, not something she was advised to do. In fact she was pretty specifically advised it was a terrible idea (it was) but she went ahead with it anyway because something something Not Real Science

Government's Marsden Fund cuts: All humanities, social sciences research funding slashed Cutting all research funding for the fields is a massive step backwards, critics say.

Slashing all Marsden grants to social science and humanities another Judith Collins legacy www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

NZNO Disgusted By Nurse’s Killing In The US We are calling for an immediate stop to ICE’s aggressive and murderous tactics in the US, says Kaiwhakahaere Kerri Nuku.

New press release from the New Zealand Nurses Organisation condemning the killing of nurse Alex Pretti and "calling for an immediate stop to ICE’s aggressive and murderous tactics in the US":

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO26...

Update on our UniSaver Divestment Campaign 🇵🇸
We have a meeting with members of the UniSaver board to further discuss divestment. More updates to come ❤️💚🖤🤍 thank you all for your support and solidarity!